The UK Space Agency will cease to exist as an independent entity to cut the cost of bureaucracy, the government said on Wednesday.
It will be absorbed by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in April 2026.
The government says this will save money, cut duplication and ensure ministerial oversight.
But one leading space scientist said the move would lead to disruption in the short term and the UK losing ground to its international competitors over the long run.
Dr Simeon Barber of the Open University feared that scrapping UKSA would lead to Britain’s space sector “losing focus”.
“Around the world countries have been recognising the importance of space by setting up national space agencies, and for the government to be scrapping ours seems like a backward step,” he said.
UKSA was created 2010 in response to the growing importance of the sector to the economy.
The development of small spacecraft, satellites and space instrumentation is a field that the UK excels at, thanks in part due to the agency. Its role is to develop the country’s space strategy, coordinate research and commercial activities and liaise with international partners.
During its tenure UKSA saw a UK astronaut, Tim Peake launched into space to work on the International Space Station and the development of Britain’s own capability to launch small satellites and other small payloads into space from Scotland.
The space sector generates an estimated £18.6bn a year and employs 55,000 people across the country.
The agency, its budget and activities will now be absorbed into DSIT. It follows a commitment from Prime Minister Keir Starmer to reduce costs and cut the number of arms length government bodies, known as quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations), starting with the abolition of NHS England announced in March.
Space minister Sir Chris Bryant said: “Bringing things in house means we can bring much greater integration and focus to everything we are doing while maintaining the scientific expertise and the immense ambition of the sector.”
The merger will see the agency become a unit within DSIT, staffed by experts from both organisations and retaining the UKSA name.
But supporters of the space agency, such as Dr Barber fear that this will mean a loss of the agency’s dynamic, proactive approach which has proved to be so successful for the UK’s space science and its space industry.
He said there was a danger of moving to more bureaucratic, less incentivised ways of working, which he said were more typical of government departments, and were the reason the agency was created in the first place.
“It feels like we’re going to get stuck in the mud again,” he told BBC News.